Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum

Gilligan, Daniel O.

Leight, Jessica

Tambet, Heleene

Mulford, Michael

A growing literature in economics has analyzed the effects of psychological interventions designed to boost individual aspirations as a strategy to increase investments with long-term returns and thus reduce poverty. This paper reports on a randomized controlled trial evaluating a short video-based intervention designed to increase aspirations of adults in poor rural Ethiopian households, all of whom are beneficiaries of the Productive Safety Net Program, the main government safety net program in Ethiopia. Evidence from a sample of 5258 adults from 3220 households is consistent with the hypothesis that there is no evidence that the aspirations treatment had any significant effects on self-reported aspirations for the household, educational investment in children, or savings nine months post-treatment, suggesting that the effect of light-touch aspirations treatments for extremely poor adults may be limited in this context.

Aspiring to more? New evidence on the effect of a light-touch aspirations intervention in rural Ethiopia

Baulch, Bob

Duchoslav, Jan

Kenamu, Edwin

Gilbert, Rachel

Palloni, Giordano

Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Change (BRACC) is a five year program whose main objective is to strengthen the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to withstand current and future weather and climate-related shocks and stresses in four districts in Southern Malawi: Balaka, Chikwawa, Mangochi and Phalombe. Resilience is operationalized as the ability of households to smooth consumption in response to shocks and stresses. This baseline report introduces the evaluation context and describes the BRACC program, details the evaluation design, summarizes main findings from the baseline household survey, and tests whether the randomizations successfully balanced baseline observable characteristics across the treatment arms.

Building resilience and adaptation to climate change in Malawi: Quantitative baseline report

de Brauw, Alan

Hoddinott, John F.

Roy, Shalini

We estimate the impact of Bolsa Família on a range of education outcomes, including school participation, grade progression, grade repetition, and dropout rates. Using a large-sample household panel survey from 20052009 collected for this evaluation, we develop a statistically balanced comparison group of eligible nonparticipant households and estimate impacts using propensity-score-weighted regression. We estimate that Bolsa Família increased average school participation among all children age 6 to 17 years by (a weakly significant) 4.5 percent. It had no effect on grade promotion, on average. However, within the subsample of girls, Bolsa Família caused substantial improvements in schooling outcomes, including significant increases in school participation (8.2 percent) and rates of grade progression (10.4 percent). We show that the gains in girls schooling do not derive from catch-up effects, but rather increase girls existing advantage in schooling attainment. In general, impacts are larger among older children, in rural areas, and in the Northeast.

Girls Advantage Increases and Older Children Gain

The Impact of Bolsa Família on Schooling

Gilligan, Daniel O.

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